David Emery OnlineFriday Links XXXXIV
4 January 2008
How we work: Philip Pullman, author
Always interesting to see how successful people do the thing that makes them successful.
Keynote Index Fund
“if you held the $10,000 of [Apple] shares bought in 1997, your investment would be worth $525,187 today”
Changes.app
Looks potentially very useful. I still want a decent Mac SVN client though…
Rails Is A Ghetto
“Repeat that to yourself. “He couldn’t keep his own servers running for longer than 4 minutes on average.””
I love a good rant, and this is a particularly good one (mostly because I’m not a Rails fan).
Fistfulayen on Radiohead
Exactly.
Gears Future APIs: Image Manipulation API
I really like the idea of being able to do things like image manipulation on the client side, but I can’t help but think a plugin like this isn’t the way to do it (if you’re using a plugin, you might as well use Flash).
io9
I really, really dislike the template that Gawker are using for all their blogs – please, could someone design them a new one?
MP3.com Meets Digg: Find New Music on Sixtyone
Sixtyone strikes me as being far too complicated, with all that points rubbish. Simple is a better and all that; although it does highlight something to me: Any site that has a colour theme changer isn’t focusing on the right things.
The problem with open source design
I’ve given up on Wordpress, to be honest – not only is it not the best blogging platform at the moment, they seem to be going in completely the wrong direction.
Jay-Z launching record label with Apple
I’ll believe it when I see it.
100 things we didn’t know last year
“16. Chimpanzees make their own spears for hunting.” – who knew?
Live Disc
Nifty – I like the concept of knowing that by the time it gets in someone’s hands it could be out of date, so it auto updates transparently. I wonder if this has any other applications?
Plaxo Flubs It
If you ask me, Facebook has been 100% in the right throughout this whole silly thing. People love to take pot shots at the guys at the top.
In defense of Facebook
You can’t innovate and continue to innovate without making some mistakes along the way.
Self-publishing is the new blogging
Every blog writer wants to have a book published. Fact.
It’s high time we moved to URL-based identifiers
The problem with URL based identifiers is that not everybody has them; while I have about a dozen that will identify me, does your mum have even one website/blog/myspace page to her name?
The Decapitator
Someone has been decapitating people depicted in adverts in and around east London. Brilliant stuff.
Is it Time to Declare Music Downloads a Loss Leader?
Giving away music for free is not the future of music sales. I’d be interested to know though how this compares tot eh sales of his last record, and also how his ticket sales go from now.
Google Presentations Adds YouTube-Like Embeds
I find it very interesting that they’ve reused the YouTube player style for the Google Presentation embeds. Slightly nasty grey gradient bar with pseudo 3D buttons = embedded content. A good usability move, I guess, but I wish YouTube used something slightly nicer looking for everyone to copy.
Final Post
Utterly inspiring.
And finally, if you weren’t sat at home in front of your computer on New Years Eve, here’s Radiohead’s ‘Scotch Mist’ webcast – the version of Videotape is well worth watching: